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Dear zoos, zooey allies, and confused others,

For the past year, I had drifted away from my initial literary focus, and this was because I had very little time for reading in 2020. I am getting back into the groove with it, though. I have become active again in my local book club, and I am using up loads of saved-up Audible credits.

The last book that I finished was Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey. I was not really all that impressed by it, to be perfectly honest. The authors (there were two) clearly cribbed most of their plot devices and imagery from video games, and their explanation of consequentialist morality is stilted and lacking in any real comprehension of how consequentialism actually works: they portray consequentialism as pure Machiavellianism and an "ends justify the means" style of thinking.

The misunderstood aspect of consequentialism is that, in its most pure exercise, it does not prescribe either good ends or bad ends, good means or bad means. Consequentialism is merely the assertion that you are responsible for the outcomes of your actions. Even if you do not know them, you are responsible for whether you attempt to learn them or do not attempt to learn them. Consequentialism is more descriptive than prescriptive: instead of telling you what moral decisions to make, it confronts you with the outcomes of your actions and says, "The ball is in your court." Rather than being a commandment, it is a tool of measure that leaves it to your own nature to determine your direction.

The book is really incapable of critiquing consequentialism without appealing to consequentialism: authors that attempt to criticize consequentialism invariably say, "You may think that consequentialism is a great idea, but if people really lived in that way, look at these dire consequences!" The argument is circular. Therefore, it was not even really successful as an attack on consequentialism.

Besides, the only real means of defending a deontological view of morality would be to argue that Don Quixote was truly a hero because he lived his life according to his knightly code. He was not a hero: he was a choad.

I recognize the need for many different perspectives on morality, but deontology needs to be set on fire along with most of its adherents. It does not provide the human race with a single drop of good that rule utilitarianism does not.

However, the book does get one thing right: one of the characters demonstrates a very important phenomenon called "metacognition." Metacognition constitutes an awareness of what you are thinking. It is like the narrator voice from a children's story describing your own thoughts. Metacognition is, for some reason, deeply interwoven with the capacity for empathy. Perhaps the reason for this link is that metacognition is really similar to a sense of empathy toward ourselves: being able to understand our own thoughts is perhaps the first step to being able to understand the thoughts of others. I actually liked that character.


Back on track,
Sigma

Anyhow, I am still working on The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littel. I might be done with it by midway through next week, but I will post something unrelated this Saturday to try to get myself back on schedule.
Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

I have been having seasonal fluctuations in my gender dysphoria for several years, now, and whenever it comes through, it can be highly distracting. I drop things, I forget where I am walking, and I generally act more like I already am.

Something that I do not talk about very often is the fact that, besides being a zoophile, I am also gender non-binary, but when I was 14, the term "gender non-binary" did not exist. When I was 14 years old, I self-identified as a "hermaphrodite," which was a term that I had learned in one of my science classes. Because there was no other language for me, at the time, the identity stuck for a long while. Most young people today understand the term "gender non-binary" better.

I have a friend that keeps citing a single case study, where a cross-dressing child with borderline learning disability was treated with an anti-psychotic drug. This is annoying to me. I know enough about the actual practice of science that I tend to ask questions like, "What was your sample size?" and "What variables did you control for?" and "How did you deal with outliers?" My friend is worried that I am being rash or going with some kind of herd.

The source of my friend's concerns is partly based on many people's reaction to the sheer ferocity with which the transgender rights movement has moved forward. Efforts at reform have been moving fast, and many people in the western world are still trying to come to grips with what all of it means. My friend does not mean to feel shaken by it, but the movement has advanced very fast. A lot of rules are changing very fast. Many people are still trying to process it.

However, I am not a movement. I am a person. I have had a quarter of a century to think about this, and for much of that time, I was alone. I did not grow up with a transgender movement. I was very much in the woods. I had to figure out a lot of things on my own. The transgender movement as most trend-followers know it did not come until after I had already gotten a pretty good idea of what I was. The transgender movement makes it easier for me to be open about this dimension of myself, but I was there first.

You generations come and go. All of you think, "This is the final change. This is the last change. It will be we that get it right. It will be we that finally arrive upon the final answer." You might not vocalize it, but you live it. It is not enough for you to believe that you are smarter than your moms and dads, but you also think you are smarter than your own kids.

The truth is that you are not really smarter than either. Your parents were the way that they were for a reason, and they were doing the best they could with limited information, just like you, just like your kids. I get it. You are doing the best you can. You give it your all. You put all of your heart into trying to get it right.

You can figure us zoophiles out, too. My people, I have seen you do magnificent things. After all of the great things you have done, I believe you can figure out how to coexist peacefully with us zoophiles. I am not giving up on you. I believe in you, and other zoophiles should also believe in you.

Over the past quarter of a century, the most important thing that I have learned about the human race is that I should always bet on the side of success anytime someone tries to have a serious, honest, heartfelt discussion with them. It might take them a generation, but when you look back, that will feel like the wing-beat of a mayfly.

The human race can do many wonderful and incredible things, but they really stink at staying the same for very long. They sure do try, every generation. Every generation thinks that the next generation is going to look at their model of life and say, "Oh, yeah. Very well-done. Thumbs-up. Five stars." Children are mean, especially to their moms and dads. That is the wonderful thing about them. That is what keeps the generations changing, over and over. The fact that we hold our moms and dads accountable, every generation, is really what makes us wonderful and special. We are special because we are hopelessly incompetent at remaining the same.

My people, when we go to the stars, things will be even weirder among this daffy and beautiful species. When the generation ships are being built in the skies above, the people looking up at them would both amaze and horrify us if we ever met them. We could never understand them. It will not be our world, though. It will be theirs.

If one of you happens to live long enough to gaze upon those great generation ships, though, then I want to ask you to send them this message for me:

"Beloved progeny to come,

I don't think you are finished, either.


With love,
Sigma"
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Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Sometimes, I make bold-sounding anti-authoritarian statements, but the weird thing is that I am also a supporter of the rule-of-law...at the same time, for the same reasons.

The idea that we should live under any kind of social contract or constitution or protocol or etiquette or guidelines or rules or any kind of abstract social agreement is anti-authoritarian. The reason why this is an anti-authoritarian idea is that this idea takes a substantial amount of power away from individual whim.

For example, if there is no rule that says that you may not play loud music on your stereo in your particular neighborhood, then your neighbor cannot bring a gun into your yard and order you to cut it off. Unless there is a local ordinance against noise pollution, you have tacit permission to do what you are doing, no matter how much it annoys your neighbors, and if they do not like this fact, then they can become more active in local political affairs if silence really means that much to them. However, something that may give your neighbor pause before attempting to push for such an ordinance is that perhaps your neighbor sometimes enjoys playing some music while washing his car during the summertime. Therefore, when you were approached by your highly annoyed neighbor, you could point out that your neighbor clearly enjoys exercising the same privilege. If enough people agree that there should indeed be a noise ordinance, then it is true that those people should have a right to enjoy peace and quiet in the homes that they have paid good money for. As long as most people enjoy having the privilege of making as much noise as they please, your neighbor does not really have the power to silence you.

For us zoophiles, one of the benefits of the social contract is how it can protect unpopular or misunderstood minority groups. In my country, the United States, we have very strict laws against cyber-stalking. Not all zoophiles want to speak out publicly, but those of us that do cannot be silenced based on threats or harassment. Those that engage in harassment against us or our employers or our families or our religious congregations are committing a serious crime.

Even if the government makes a law that would technically seem to brand you as a criminal based on your unique sexuality, the law still protects you, as hard as this may be to believe. For example, a prosecuting attorney cannot possibly make a case against you without hard evidence. No evidence, no case. Furthermore, you are never under any obligation to acknowledge having specifically done anything illegal. If the only evidence that can be brought against you is your stated beliefs or identity or views on morality, then it is very difficult to even press charges against you, much less have those charges result in a conviction in the United States.

You should also be aware of the various approaches to jurisprudence, which is a subject that usually comes up in discussions about constitutional law but which also applies sometimes to statutory law. While almost all judges really use a variety of approaches to jurisprudence, different judges have different leanings. While I am far from being an expert on case law, I have enough general knowledge about the subject to discuss one of them that I am particularly aware of. Even though the schools of thought in regard to constitutional interpretation do not always directly affect the interpretation of statutory law, these ideas can nevertheless have pervasive influence on how jurists and attorneys think about case law.

Under the purposive approach to jurisprudence, it is not just the text of the law that defines interpretation, but it is also relevant what sorts of arguments and documents were used in order to promote that law in the court of law. Therefore, if a legislature were falsely led to believe that human-animal sex were inherently violent based on documents that have since been discredited, a defense attorney could argue that the intent of that particular statute was clearly to prevent an act of unequivocal violence. If new scientific research were to emerge demonstrating that zoophiles were a distinct group of people that were clearly a differently motivated group of people from animal-torturers, then a defense attorney could argue that the law was clearly intended to punish animal-torturers, based on the assumptions that had been made by the legislature.

Another thing that is on your side is a legal concept called stare decisis. What this means is that the way that a statute has been used in the past tends to have a strong effect on how it will be used in the future. As you could probably guess, laws that are intended for protecting animals from harm have a much higher likelihood of being enforced when the person that reported that crime actually observed an animal in distress. Therefore, the preponderance of cases that actually resulted in convictions are likely to be instances where an animal was truly seriously injured. The more that those kinds of cases result in the majority of actual convictions, the less likely it is that the same statute will be used differently in the future.

In the United States, though, every defendant has a right to a grand jury, which is a very important part of our democracy (think about that next time you are called to serve on a jury). Therefore, public perceptions are likely to have a powerful effect on the decisions of a jury. If most people that are likely to be called to a jury regard animal-sex as inherently harmful, then this is likely to lead to a litany of convictions against non-violent zoophiles, but if most people believe that there is a remarkable difference between a zoophile and an animal-torturer, most people that were charged with a crime would have at least one ardent defender on a grand jury, and since the majority of jurists just want to go home, one ardent defender is enough to bring the likelihood of convictions down to almost zero. To understand how one jurist can stop an unjust conviction, even in the face of strong evidence, you should consider watching a film named 12 Angry Men (1957).

The role of the jurist in a real world court-of-law is one of the reasons why we zoophiles should be supportive of those brave zoos that are attempting to improve the public visibility of us zoophiles that are at least trying to be benevolent and peaceful. Many zoophiles are understandably shy about public visibility, but this shyness is self-defeating and misguided. It only takes one determined jurist to stop a conviction. Self-righteous jerks will almost invariably grow impatient to go home because self-righteous jerks are morally shallow. The people that believe that we are benevolent and undeserving of persecution will stand up for us. It is therefore critically important for us zoophiles to have a voice, especially as long as we live under a democracy. We must reach out to society if we want a chance to reach those noble souls that would understand that we are at heart benevolent and peaceful because that is something that matters deeply to certain people in our society. Reaching out to our people matters.

The best kind of social contracts for all of us to live under, including zoophiles, are those that are based on the general principles of democracy. Maybe you are a strong libertarian or even a true anarchist, and you think that any kind of government at all is a mistake. Nevertheless, democracy is the best mistake that we have made, so far. Out of all forms of government, a democracy has the greatest likelihood of protecting your freedom as long as you choose to live in peace with others in your society. If you choose to be a good neighbor, then your neighbors will usually be on your side, so think about that the next time your neighbor wants you to turn your music down. In the long-run, democracies usually tend to protect people that choose to live in peace with their neighbors.

Even in the absence of democracy, life is more free under the rule-of-law. The rule-of-law limits how much those in power can do to hurt you or to disrupt your life. It protects you and those that are dear to you from dangerous vigilantes. It gives you the means to defend your reputation and your freedom when your right to both are brought into question. The rule-of-law is not just a sword to be used by the self-righteous, but it is also a shield to be used by the humble. As long as we live under the rule-of-law, then you are probably safe from anything too terrible happening to you.

I might make cheeky claims of being an "anarchist," but I also know that I would not be more free without the rule-of-law there to protect me. The rule of law is what helps preserve my freedom to call myself an anarchist, whether half-jokingly or seriously. I am indeed only halfway serious when I proclaim myself to be an anarchist, but I am dead-serious when I say that my views are anti-authoritarian. Because of that, I value the rule-of-law. The rule-of-law helps to defend my rights, even though it also stops me from threatening the rights of others.


In the name of freedom,
Sigma
Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

My gray-muzzle friend and I have been trying to catch up on Bojack, but this is just a very long series. We're probably going to have to defer the rest of the series to next time he is in town. That said, I have already blogged about the series.

Developing very well established friendships can be a double-edged sword for community. On one hand, it is great to have a fellow zoo that you trust well enough to open up to entirely, but on the other hand, it can become hard to meet new people thereafter because of you and they having found a comfort zone.

However, friendships always evolve, and they cannot help but to evolve. For people that think in generations, there is no such thing as a shiftless rut, but life goes through various stages and transformations, leaving the essential constants intact while altering just about everything else. Two people might touch each others' lives for a few months or a few years, and they might go their separate ways for a few months or a few years. If they never really part on terms of bitterness, they will eventually find each other again, sometimes to actually do things they once only wanted to talk about doing.

For example, I am currently at a stage of life where long paid vacations are not really a part of my life. A trip out to the American Midwest is currently not in the cards for me. If I ever got the great desk job that I am applying for, then I would be able to think about those kinds of ideas. Right now, I don't have the luxury of thinking in terms of long trips out to other parts of the country. I cannot think in terms of traveling to faraway places. I am thinking in terms of binging on television series and making endless hours of conversation.

Even though Bojack is just a television series that I am binging, right now, it has still taught me something about life. The best kinds of shows do. I should not get caught up in the future, which I have no control over, or the past, which I have no ability to change. The show is trying to teach us about being emotionally present in the moment that we are living in.

Mr. Peanut Butter does this presence in the moment trick well; however, Mr. Peanut Butter has the alternate tragedy of only ever living in the moment, and he is ultimately a shallow individual that is happy, most of the time, but also incapable of understanding very much. He enjoys just about every moment that he is in, but that is all that he really does, and eventually, he starts to awaken to the truth: he does indeed have a great tragedy of his own because, in the end, Mr. Peanut Butter is a one-trick dog.

However, if all that someone really does is sad, deep personal introspection, they are likewise a one-trick pony. They are so busy with this sort of deep emotional state that they spend their entire lives underwater, looking up at the world through the blue funk that they live in and thinking more heavily than they really need to about the consequences of what they do. They end up sabotaging themselves and their lives because they come to believe that they are incapable of being happy, having found unhappiness somewhere in everything. We would be shallow if we never stopped to think deeply about life, but if that were all that we did, then we would never really be a part of life: it would just be a television screen that we sat in front of and watched as if that life belonged to somebody that we could never really be.

That television screen is a metaphor for dissociation. Most people are afraid to think about dissociation because of its association with mental illness. Almost everybody dissociates, in some way or another, at times in their lives, though. Derealization is one of the most commonplace forms of dissociation, and it constitutes the sense that one is looking at life from far away. This experience is not really unhealthy, either. It is an opportunity to observe ourselves like fish in a tank for a while, and it gives us a chance to look upon our own lives as spectators. Dissociation is great for our health if we take it in moderation. It is a candidate for microdosing.

Being present with the person that I am in the process of getting to know is okay because I know, from experience, that that is not where we will always be. Because I am not always present in the moment, I am not as fearful of being in different kinds of moments.

The reader might ask, though, what does this have to do with zoophilia? One might ask, how does a deep and continuously evolving friendship connect with the experience of being a zoo?

Our animals are wonderful, but they cannot fill in the parts of our lives that crave seemingly endless philosophical conversations or the desire to do something with our lives like plan a trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia to get in touch with an ancient traditional Buddhism that has gone virtually unchanged for centuries or Moab, Utah to follow a procession of rich Sikhs up an off-road trail. Perhaps there is such a thing as a zoophile that is truly happier if they never meet another human being in their entire life, but that is not me.

However, if this story becomes merely about my experience and not about my experience as a zoo, am I therefore losing focus? Well, maybe zoophiles could stand to lose focus on just being people that are sexually and romantically attracted to animals. If all we understood about ourselves was our status as a minority group, then we would go crazy. I think that every zoophile should take a break from thinking about zoo and just binge a television series or go on an adventure with a friend.

One thing that social persecution does to some of us, which is very unhealthy, is that it draws what would otherwise be a relatively small part of the background of our lives into the foreground. If it had not been for the 2018 outbreak of anti-zoo extremism, then zoo would have just been a weird thing that happened between me and some of my animals, once in a while, and generally been forgotten. I never would have felt like I needed to identify as a zoo or as anything truly different from my fellow human being. I cared more about other things that were weird about me.

The 2018 outbreak of anti-zoo extremism made me feel very concerned about both my own welfare and the welfare of many other zoos, and I wish that these phony crusaders and zealots would just back off and let me go back to being a regular person. Let me go back to being an ancient Greek nerd. Let me go back to being a secular humanist that is ironically obsessed with world religions. I have a marriage and a career. The single worst thing that anti-zoo extremists have done to me is to make zoo more of a part of my life than I ever really invited it to be.

It cannot be undone, either. As long as these horrible anti-zoo laws are on the books, which they probably will be for a long time, it will be necessary for us zoophiles to continue trying to improve our relations with society and with law enforcement so that nobody will read those laws and form the false conclusion that we are somehow dangerous or criminal-minded or capable of other kinds of crimes. The damage is done: because of current conditions, we have no choice except to continue the conversation. We are stuck with it. Now that he conversation has been started, the only logical conclusion is for everybody to eventually have spent a while thinking deeply about human-animal sex.

Animals are not just capable of consent, but I think the animal concept of consent is really, in some ways, better. As humans, we cannot escape the mixture of gift and curse that we are saddled with by our overgrown prefrontal cortex. There is a reason why this organ does not usually grow so large, in nature: it is not really universally advantageous, and it fills an otherwise perfectly functional ape with dark and painful existential dread. Our animals do, however, have the same basic structures, but they also have a combination between lesser capacity and lesser complication in their lives. They do indeed care if they really wanted to do something, but they do not form the convoluted and emotionally complicated abstract thoughts that humans cannot help but to form and to torment themselves with. This is why we have so much toxic politics surrounding our sexuality and every other subtopic that is related to our free will. This is why we should be cautious about the assumption that the large prefrontal cortex of a human being is really something that puts us above other animals. They can be an anchor of the kind that drags us down into emotional cycles and meaningless political feuds that really ultimately hurt us, and this is why the deep and sophisticated Bojack does not always live a better life than his nemesis, Mr. Peanut Butter. We have an opportunity to experience a wonderful gift, as a species, if we would only recognize that there are limits to how much that gift can really do for us. It can give us a depth of feeling, knowledge, and experience, and those things are wonderful. It cannot give us happiness in the moment. We, as humans, must eventually learn to distinguish between what our unique qualities, as a species, can do for us and what our unique qualities, as a species, cannot do for us. Good sex is something that a mouse can do, and if we, as a species, would let go of our need to always be only the things that make us different from the mouse, I think that we could really have a more complete experience of being human. The common ancestor between ourselves and mice--and farther back, between ourselves and dogs--is still somewhere inside us, and accepting that this is a part of our experience is the key to unraveling the deep existential crisis that our species is going through. Perhaps it is not utterly unique as a human curse, but the extent to which it hurts us is unique.

I still do not believe that I have communicated my feelings about consent fully, and I leave out a large amount of context, there, that I think would only be understood by someone that knew me well. The point is not that I think that animals lack any capacity at all for consent, but the human concept of consent is something that I see as deeply flawed and not even very good for humans. The relatively simple concept of consent that animals can understand, I think, does more because it asks for less. The intricate cortex of the human frontal lobe is something that we humans can get lost in, and because we can get so lost in our own brains, we often have no clear idea of what, if anything, we want. We are prone to paralysis of analysis and existential crisis because of our false belief that we can solve all of our problems by throwing more axons into a problem that is really caused by having too many of them with no clear idea of what we are going to use them for. Our intentions are multi-layered and filled with subtext and multi-faceted meanings, but because of this, we really have no idea why we do anything at all.

I believe that humans could learn from how animals think of consent. Animals are really better at it in some ways. They are better at knowing what they want or don't want, and they therefore communicate more clearly. They are incapable of understanding consent as humans understand it, but the way that humans understand consent is the synaptic equivalent of bloatware, which is useless baggage that is based on misguided attempts to maintain backward compatibility or just trying to do too much while having too little concept of what the entire system is really meant for. We humans make our lives hard, but we never really had to.

The human capacity for nuance is not entirely without its uses, but if that capacity for nuance is not directed fully at making us better at knowing what will make us happy, we can get ourselves into trouble. Our frontal lobes are powerful, but they are powerful toward whatever end that we put them toward, be that end good or bad.

Someday, I think that my fellow Americans will understand that sort of thinking, and I will be able to go back to being a regular person with other concerns in life. It might be far away, now, but because of the unique things about being a human being, I can still care about things, even if they are far away and seemingly almost impossible to imagine being real. That is what distinguishes me from an animal. I can understand the idea that my society evolves. I can understand that the only constant in human existence is change. I can understand the concept that today's unrealistically grotesque Hollywood supervillains are almost invariably tomorrow's martyrs. It is a part of how humans behave.

However, that is why I need human friends. I need someone with me in my life that understands what it means to dream of something and then pursue that dream, months or years later. I might not have a job with paid leave now, but I hope that I will by the end of the year or at latest by next year. I can think ahead, and for now, I can relax and just enjoy the immediate experience of talking about it and picturing it in my mind. Only my fellow humans can think, "someday."

To my fellow zoos, community is just being friends with someone that gets you, and if it does not seem extraordinary, right now, then that is okay. It's supposed to just be a normal friendship. That is the point.

As pleasant as it is to think of myself as a dragon, which is merely a gifted animal, I am stuck with also having the unique experience of human thought, which no animal can ever have. I am also stuck with the unique human problem of having the need to feel understood and accepted. That will not go away. As long as I am human, I cannot stay quiet in a world where I know that I am deeply misunderstood because of a difference that I am frankly appalled that anybody would care about.


I would rather just think about Moab,
Sigma
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Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Did you know that there are some dogs that have a serious weakness for fishnets?

This blog is supposed to be about a weird alternative sexuality that is socially so incredibly controversial that there is a large section of society that wants to abolish even fair intellectual debate about the subject, thereby replacing advanced liberal philosophical disputation with merely propagandizing violent hate toward a minority group that has continued to exist in spite of routine persecution, violence, injustice, and social marginalization.

There are some members of that group of people that just want to give up, lie down, and forget about the discussion. They want to just linger peacefully in the dark and sleazy margins of the Internet, hopeful that the world will ultimately forget that they are there as they go on about their existence. This has indeed been done, but this lasted right up until a young person with the screen-name Kero, who was mentally vulnerable because of his own loneliness, came to be groomed into a passive acceptance of a violent subculture of animal-torturers, and one other young man called Snake Thing had lost his way so terribly that he was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison due to his hideous crimes.

For all of the pearl-clutching that has been done over those people, by zoophiles, I point my finger at them in blame. Those young people lost their way because the gray-muzzles in our own community would not take responsibility. Instead of taking responsibility for misguided youth, they pushed those young people away because they were not ready to answer the difficult questions that a young person asks.

For instance, society proclaims, with a sense of certainty, that I should abstain from cruelty, but in the end, society's own argument for it is generally based on their own toxic cruelty toward anybody that they believe, with or without justification, can be accused of cruelty.

The people thereby become so addicted to their own sense of schadenfreude, comfortably shielded from guilt over that schadenfreude behind an invisible shield of righteous fury, that threshold at which they are prepared to unleash that righteous fury ultimately creeps. It creeps ever nearer to a point of arising without any provocation at all, and ultimately, there is nothing left except righteous fury and its concomitant cruelty.

Our morality is not the problem, then. The problem is how we deal with that morality.

We can say that a person is a terrible person without also saying that this condones us becoming terrible people, ourselves. We do not need to become the villains in somebody else's tragic opera in order to have moral convictions of our own. We can treat a terrible person with empathy or even love without going into denial about what that person is, and if we are very lucky, we sometimes even find cases where we can chart a course for the slow, painful, and grinding process of an eventual redemption of that person.

We do not always get that story arc of redemption, but even when we do not or cannot, we must not ourselves become a part of the process of cruelty. When we come to answer against what we deem as cruelty with even more cruelty, we do nothing except to provoke the defensiveness of those that we are attempting to censure, and instead of stopping those people, we unintentionally start a process where they have constructed a system of toxic apologetics. This thereby fans the flames to a raging volcanic hatred and thereby an even greater thirst for schadenfreude disguised as justice, and we ultimately fall into a moral dissociative spiral where witch-hunting mobs do battle against an ever-growing throng of increasingly morally nihilistic individuals that have just given up on being good at all, not because they are inherently evil but because they instinctively sense that there is something broken about the entire premise of the discussion.

While I am usually a more literary individual, I can enjoy television programming that has philosophical undercurrents that were inspired by great literature. I have watched a Netflix show, recently, that shows that we do not have to choose between either toxic self-righteousness or a lack of any moral direction at all. Instead, we can merely accept that a terrible person is indeed a terrible person but is also a person that has complex depths of emotion beyond just the callousness or selfishness with which that person behaves toward other living things or toward society. We do not have to be heartless just because somebody else can seem to be heartless.

A friend and I have been watching the series Bojack Horseman, and I recommend the show for its intensely self-aware style of social criticism. It follows the life of a clearly complicated man, but the show takes an unusual approach of openly discussing the reasons why he does the things that he does. The show challenges how society deals with public figures, even while also acknowledging the truth about them. The show examines how toxic relationships can get started and why they are the way they are. It analyzes how the destructive manipulation that a narcissistic individual can engage in can be motivated based on that person's own terror over being alone, and instead of creating a narrative that pardons that person, it just finds even more layers of pettiness that, in the end, are rooted in the sheer nihilism of living in a universe that does not deliver on its promise of giving us any ultimate meaning or explanation for why we should bother trying at all.

The world tells us forcefully that we should care, and the world fills itself full of righteous fury when it finds out that some people do not care. That righteous fury does not give us any explanation for why we should care, though.

And why don't we just let that righteous fury continue spiraling out-of-control? Why don't we just let the world burn itself down in an ever-escalating holocaust? Let the world have its petty witch-hunts and moral crusades. Let the white knights charge on their horses, clothed in righteous fury, as they draw the spiral ever tighter, eventually bringing us back to those dark ages where we hanged people for being homosexual or for having heterodox interpretations of the same religious faith. We can have another war over iconoclasm v. sacred imagery. Indeed, why shouldn't we just let society tear itself apart?

Honestly, why do we philosophers, who question this self-defeating cycle, even give a fuck? When we think about how small this little whirling ball of dust is in the larger universe, why do we still care?

However, why should I be obligated to care if even caring itself is futile?

One day, I decided to care, and I kept on caring. I kept waiting for the universe to step in front of me with its hand out, saying, "Wait, you can't care, for there is no point in caring," but that moment never came. Since there are no rules at all, then there is not really any rule that I should not give a fuck. I can give a fuck just because I decided that that was what I wanted to do. Much as that in itself might constitute an absurd process of self-flagellation, fuck it. I don't have to care that it is futile for me to care. I can engage in this mad process of self-injury if that is what I choose to do.

That is how I cracked the nihilistic fallacy. The nihilist falsely believes that there is going to be some sort of significance or meaning to be derived from the conclusion that the world is indeed meaningless, but spinning one's wheels in that hole is not really going to make the world any less of a wet speck of dust in the great cosmos. In the end, I do not have to dwell only on that nihilism, but I am free, even free to care and to love.

Therefore, I try to eat less meat every week, so I can spend less and less of my hard-earned money on an industry that does things to animals that I disagree with. I do not have to practice this self-righteously, and I do not even have to hate meat-eaters for being meat-eaters. I do not have to hate myself for occasionally consuming something that came from an animal. I do not have to dwell on the hypocrisy of caring and yet doing careless things when it is convenient for me to do so. I can merely act with care because that is what it crossed my mind to do at the time.

When I just keep repeating this pattern, I just keep finding out more, every day, that it does not really hurt me to act with care. It does not really hurt me to choose the vegetarian option and thereby support the growing industry that caters to our carnivorous appetite without actually slaughtering an animal in order to do so. I have some good vegan breakfast sausage in the freezer, and I just might fry that up with some blueberry pancakes because fuck it: who is going to stop me?

In the end, I also do not have to anguish over whether or not I have always been as zooey as I could be in my sexuality with animals. We say "zooey," in the zooey community, with a sense of acting with genuine compassionate storybook love toward our non-human sexual partners. All of us zoophiles are at risk of acting like any other callus, cynical fuck-stick toward our animals and just using our animals with all of the care that we would a fleshlight, and just because we cannot prove that we are always good people we do not really have to let that disrupt those moments when we have just done it right.

No matter who we are or what we have done in the past or probably will do in the future, we do not really have to deny ourselves those perfect, beautiful, sunlit moments where there is nothing but love. If we just let ourselves enjoy having them without getting caught up in the false belief that we are anything besides what we are doing at a particular moment, then we could merely develop a taste for those moments. A time could come when we have grown addicted to those sunlit moments if we just let it happen.

The nihilist's fallacy is very simple. The nihilist believes falsely that the universe will care if that person is a nihilist. The nihilist, having reached the conclusion of nihilism, is shocked and angry that the universe does not care about that person's nihilism, and that is why the nihilist is never really happy but just filled with all the more bitterness. That bitterness can end when the nihilist accepts, eventually, that nihilism itself also came to no end.

At that point, the nihilist can just let go in either one way or the other, by either letting go of being alive or by letting go by embracing the sheer absurdity of life and embracing the inherently quixotic nature of giving a shit.

Existential nihilists are often these angry and bitter goths when they are children, but if they go far enough down that road, many of them are also merry bird-watching folk singers by late adulthood. This transformation does not happen because they let go of that nihilism, but instead, it happened because they embraced it fully. Ultimately, nihilism does not really have to take us to dark places. It only took us to dark places because we were so entitled that the world should give a shit that we knew we were all full of shit, but when we accepted that the world still simply didn't care, we felt better.

We can just let go and be free.


With happy liberation,
Sigma
Dear zoos, zooey allies, and all of my wonderful comrades,

Sometimes, I call myself a communist, and I am only halfway joking about that. I do not agree with the idea of a state monopoly, but I agree with Max Weber's belief that the primary function of a state is to monopolize the use of force. Nevertheless, I believe that Vladimir Lenin's model for starting revolutions was tremendously successful, and part of the basis of that model was a uniquely Russian concept, tovarish, which translates roughly into English as "comrade." However, the word tovarish translates more literally to "one who works in a trade," and in the context of communism, it means "one who works in the same trade as I." However, the Ottoman Turkish root davar, which means "cattle," makes the real meaning of the word tovarish something more akin to "fellow shepherd," which better implies the humbleness and simplicity of that ancient pastoral occupation.

While it would be correct to state that the etymology behind that word implies that communism was focused on starting trade unions, the means of organizing trade unions can be applied to organizing people based on a common identity, including a common identity as an oppressed group of people. Nevertheless, this extended understanding of how to use the concept of a tovarish was not accepted widely by Russian communists, who saw other types of identity-based groups as a distraction from the cause of organizing the proletariat.

The Russian communists perceived that splitting people off into different struggles against oppression would cause people to lose focus on fighting against the capitalist oppressor, and in a way, they were right: organizing feminists and sexual minorities and ethnic groups together became entrenched deeply in western liberal philosophy, and people that would have otherwise been more active in fighting against capitalism were using the same energy to fight for other types of causes that were just as meaningful to them. Unlike the Russian communists, this suits me just fine because I am not altogether a communist: I just think their model for revolution is sexy, so I think we should steal it.

If you are still interested, the way that Vladimir Lenin did it was very simple. His model for revolution was really based upon friendship. In case you are wondering, this actually does mean that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is really a training program for revolutionaries thinly disguised as an innocent and funny kid show.

You can build up friendships in many different ways. You can host a biweekly tabletop RPG. You can host a weekly night of Jackbox games. If you live close enough to each other, you can just fuck each other while dressed up in kinky animal cosplay gear, a shiny stainless steel chastity cage, and those adorably derpy beetlejuice-striped arm-warmers and knee-socks that you see sometimes in furry erotic art, which I realize is curiously specific but which I swear is actually five-gallon buckets of fun if you don't take it or yourself too seriously. However you choose to do it, bringing people together as friends is really the basis for starting any revolution.

The reason why it works comes down to the dual nature of oxytocin, which is linked with friendship. Oxytocin is not just a harmless "snuggle-hormone," but it also lies at the heart of more combative emotions. In the worst case scenario, oxytocin can be blamed for racism. The more combative emotions that are linked with oxytocin can admittedly go down dark paths. On the other hand, you also need those kinds of combative emotions in order to start any kind of substantial resistance movement against violent oppression. Friendship is therefore a weapon, and while it can be a dangerous weapon, that weapon can be used for noble purposes.

Let me level with you: I think that the USSR's economic beliefs were dumb. When I praise their model for revolution, I am not really praising the policies that they brought into effect. I agree with conclusions that have been reached in mainstream western economic journals, which support diverse points of view but tend to fall within the general constellation of neo-classical, New Keynesian, and monetarist approaches to economics.

Regardless, the methods of revolution that were pioneered by Vladimir Lenin are indispensable to anybody that wants to start a revolutionary movement of any kind. If you want to bring about social change, you must build any such movement on the solid primal foundation of deep friendships based on common identity.

The word tavarish is not one that I would use routinely, but I do think that its use is handy for starting a discussion about the means of organizing people around a common identity. For regular use, I have decided that I will only use that term sparingly. I do not believe that trade unions should be the only focus for the emotional energy that would need to be invested in starting one.

Instead, I will use the word "comrade," which has a more general meaning based on its etymology. It comes from the same root as "chamber," which historically referred to chambers within an arched structure like a neolithic dome tent that, over many generations, would have been reinforced and weatherproofed by packed mud, sod, and wood ash that eventually would have solidified into a more permanent cement-like composite material that, when in use by a sedentary culture, would have been kept polished smooth and, in some cases, might have been painted kaolin-white by prehistoric house wives that would have been annoyed if they had been forced to prepare family meals within a dwelling that looked gloomy and unsanitary. Nevertheless, it would have originally been a tent. In other words, we zoophiles are all within the same tent, and even though we come from many different backgrounds and political orientations, it is imperative learn how to act with a sense of camaraderie if we want to make sure that that tent can protect us from the elements.


With loving camaraderie,
Sigma
Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

I am one of a growing number of zoophiles that self-describe as "neurodivergent," and this term is inspired by the idea that I am not really mentally disabled: however, I can be harmed by the fact that my society is not very well equipped for teaching me how to be good at being me. To help remedy that, I have seen psychotherapists and counselors, who have been able to teach me things that my parents and teachers did not know how to teach me. At this point in my life, I am prosperous and well-adjusted because of the fact that I sought the support that I once needed.

In the past, zoophiles have rarely embraced neurodivergence, partly due to the neglect of zoophiles in the majority of mental health institutions. Sometimes, we have found that mental health professionals can ignore our real problems while focusing, erroneously, on treating our zoophilia as a problem. Overcoming this has been an uphill battle.

However, zoophilia is coming to be better understood in the field of psychotherapy, and more zoophiles that are already receiving psychotherapy are bravely coming out. The more of us that do, the better psychotherapists will understand this, so with each generation, more zoophiles may find that their psychotherapists can be the first people they ever come out to as zoophiles.

Also, I believe that it is important for us zoophiles to embrace neurodivergence as a concept. Because there are so many humans, humans are not just one species, but we are many: we constitute many different species that are born with a tremendous number of behavioral adaptations. Those adaptations can often conflict with mainstream methods of teaching. I am not sure that zoophiles inherently work differently from other humans, but the only way that we can know is to get more out zoophiles into the system.

Importantly, the point of psychotherapy is not to stop you from being you, but the point of psychotherapy is to help you get a little bit better at being you. There is a difference. In other words, the kind of psychotherapy that is used to help a person that has obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is not intended to "cure" obsessive-compulsive personality disorder: the psychotherapy is intended to teach that person how to get better at being a person with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, so a time will come when that person merely has an obsessive-compulsive personality, not really a disorder.

Furthermore, it is rare, in the related field of psychiatry, for drugs to be used as a permanent solution, except for severe cases where someone is genetically predisposed toward illnesses that can stop them from remaining fully functional as contributing members of society. Even many people with some forms of bipolar disorder are only expected to take anticonvulsant drugs for a few months or sometimes for a few years before being weaned off of those drugs: exceptional cases actually do require lifetime medication, but this is not what most psychiatrists desire as an outcome. It is becoming the norm for drugs to be seen as a temporary solution for most people that need to take them.

In conclusion, it does not make someone "mentally disabled" to receive psychotherapy. The idea of psychotherapy is also not to change the things about us that make us unique and special. The idea behind psychotherapy is to make sure that the things that make us unique and special can be an asset for us, rather than a disability.

When I call myself "neurodivergent," what I mean by that is that I did indeed receive the care of a mental health professional at one time in my life, and because I did, the things that make me different have become some of the coolest things about me. Getting help did not mean that I had to stop being me, but I just got better at being me.

More zoophiles are also embracing this idea, now, and I think that that is awesome.


In the pursuit of great mental health for us all,
Sigma
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Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

I hope that it was obvious to all readers that my blog post, for February 6, 2016, was written with tongue firmly in cheek. To those for whom this realization does not come as easily, I am very sorry, but you have been had. I do have a serious reason for this prank: it is vital for people like us zoophiles to comprehend how quickly and easily a small subset of people, which nevertheless dramatically outnumber us, can be moved to radical extremism.

The real joke is that every claim contained in it was technically accurate or at least reasonably probable, but those facts had also been curated, which is to say “cherry-picked,” in order to seemingly arrive at the patently ridiculous conclusion that the entire gay rights movement was a Satanic conspiracy and that all support groups (which still have favor in the field of practical psychology) are really an anarcho-communist plot.

Firstly, let me get the “Satanic conspiracy” baggage out of the way.

*takes a deep breath*

First, here is a blusteringly long-winded explanation of Aleister Crowley that you can feel free to skim starting from the point where you would interject, “okay, Sigma, I get it.” If you find my writing style to be intrinsically entertaining, then feel free to peruse at your leisure. In fact, Aleister Crowley was the founder of the Thelema movement, which was a precursor to the modern Wicca movement and other neopagan belief systems, but my perception is that this was a part of how the man named Aleister Crowley chose to deal with having come from a family of fundamentalist Christians while not actually having the temperament to seriously entertain their ridiculous paranoid fantasy version of reality. Having grown up seeing how sincerely those people believed (or tried to believe) in their version of reality (and how histrionic they were about it), Aleister Crowley probably recognized that it would foment a delicious amount of hysteria if somebody, namely him, were to actually found a movement that conveniently fit in with their distorted concept or reality while also being patently ridiculous enough, from the perspective of any reasonable person (religious or not), to come across clearly as a joke. By doing so, he was able to goad a small minority of Christians into becoming absolutely hysterical, thereby attracting attention to himself, while also producing high class entertainment for anybody else on the entire planet that did not have a genetic predisposition to paranoid fantastical delusions, including the majority of otherwise reasonable Christians (a surprising percentage of whom are actually agnostic about whether or not their faith is actually a sort of metaphorical and colorfully presented version of views that would be a lot more appealing to the majority of atheists if those atheists were not such literal-minded semi-autistic stick-in-the-muds (to which some of us atheists say “I prefer reading those fantasy novels with titty-tinglingly/boner-inducingly sexy-looking dragons and gryphons on the covers, which are much more obviously bare-ass naked and therefore objects of soft porn when one embraces the fact that they are, in spite of usually being quadrupedal, incredibly sapient or sometimes super-sapient creatures with amazingly attractive and charismatic personalities, and those novels really teach the same exact moral lessons while not accidentally leading gullible and easily deluded individuals into taking them literally, so as a matter of fact, I actually do fully comprehend the value of metaphor but also prefer to keep my fantasy life and my perceptions of reality firmly segregated”).

Besides the attractiveness of using a fake religion as a form of showmanship, Aleister Crowley was probably concerned about the fact that other Christians were not fully comprehending of how wacky religious fundamentalists actually were, and in a time when religious fundamentalism was spreading like cancer in western society, he probably believed that the socially responsible thing to do was to goad them into exposing what wacky, delusional jack mules they actually were and thereby getting more reasonable religious people to realize that they were, in fact, both embarrassing and dangerous. Therefore, Aleister Crowley essentially trolled his way into using the hysterical antics of people that had the same lunatic beliefs as his family members into giving him free advertising to provide some relatively innocent fun for people that were really just bored and just wanted to A) have a good time with some like-minded company and B) find and indulge in some of the most likely entertainingly hallucinogenic drugs that some of these people were apparently on. The only people that took Crowley seriously had either indulged in far too much of those aforementioned drugs (which are really no longer really therapeutic when taken at dosages that can actually distort your perception of reality, so please consider microdosing and thereby most likely elevating your usefulness society instead of scrambling your synapses into potentially believing in stupid things) and really thought they were witches or, assuming they were annoyingly brainwashed individuals like his parents, involuntarily served as his free advertising. Aleister Crowley was essentially a delightful fraud, and even practically all Christians, besides the ones that the majority of otherwise literate and rational Christians considered to be profoundly embarrassing, found Aleister Crowley to be a delightfully amusing peddler of quite frankly adorably campy showmanship that was disguised exceedingly thinly as a religious cult. Many of the people that were attracted to it were also people that, just like Aleister Crowley, were concerned about the detrimental effect of religious fundamentalism on society and, also like Aleister Crowley, found that trolling those fundamentalists into paranoid and crazy reactions was a useful way of sounding the alarm, to otherwise reasonable religious people, about the dangers of fundamentalism. Again, most Christians are not really the incredibly dense bunch of idiots that some of the more intellectually self-righteous sorts of atheists (the more histrionic of whom are really even more dense and full of shit than the fundamentalists themselves) have made them out to be, so the majority of Christians, at the time, could recognize a parody when they saw one. The ones that could not see it for themselves were told the same by friends that they trusted to know a sarcastic troll when they saw one.

Well, the connection between the Thelema movement and Harry Hay, co-founder of the Mattachine Society (the first gay rights organization that did not almost immediately collapse due to infighting and betrayal) is vaguely real, but the concept that this means that Harry Hay could really be argued to be involved in the Thelema movement is rather hysterical. One of Harry Hay’s hobbies was the theater arts, which gay men at the time were apparently attracted to like flies to shit, and it is also inevitable that an appreciable percentage of other people, in that subculture, would also be attracted to a fake religion that was designed as a hilariously campy and endlessly entertaining critique of religious fundamentalism. A priestess of Thelema, not really being deranged enough to be friends with people that were genuinely evil, would have also been delighted by the prospect of befriending someone that was officially evil but, once you got to know him, clearly was not even slightly a threat to any living thing whatsoever besides the virginity of handsome gay men: it was deliciously wicked yet profoundly approachable. The friendship between them was almost inevitable.

At this point, any reasonably educated westerner would find it patently ridiculous to believe that Harry Hay's friendship with a Thelema priestess implies that the Harry Hay was part of a Satanic conspiracy, but as a reminder, the majority of westerners are Christians; in spite of the fact that an appreciable percentage of those can grasp the concept that their religion might be more useful as a sort of metaphor that they merely assume is real, in the same way that mathematicians treat imaginary numbers as real for the sake of deriving useful outcomes, there is nevertheless an appreciable percentage of Christians who literally believe that the physical or, at minimum, ghostly embodiments of the monsters from Revelation are real, lurking somewhere in society, and they believe that those monsters are always busy seeding corruption and wickedness throughout our civilization.

While most of even those individuals are not actually dangerous taken by themselves, they outnumber almost all sexual minority groups, and in a society in which gay sex was almost universally illegal or at least severely socially stigmatizing, making it a very bad career move for any gay person to try to publicly defend themselves. The ones that did generally had little to lose because they had also made other bad career moves, so the few gay people that actually were willing to be publicly visible did not have the best judgment.

Furthermore, it is an actual fact that Harry Hay was a communist, and it is also an actual fact that Harry Hay advocated on behalf of modeling the gay rights movement after self-help organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous. It is also true that Alcoholics Anonymous had been modeled originally based on the anarcho-communist theories of former Russian prince Pyotr Kropotkin. Furthermore, Kropotkin's theory of anarcho-communism was based on his observations of nature, and the theory was also presented in his original work, Mutual Aid, as an alternative theory of natural selection, which had traditionally been presented as a highly individualistic "arena" process at the time: Kropotkin's theory was that if he could prove that mutual aid and cooperation actually does work in nature, he could therefore convince humans that they could benefit from adopting a collectivist model for their social organizations. Furthermore, Harry Hay had had a lifelong passion for paleontology, which played a role in the fact that he dropped out of college after reluctantly going to college in order to study law at the self-defeatingly impolite behest of his father: in light of Hay's communist views and strong interest in paleontology, a field which is highly interwoven with the theory of evolution, it is possible but, in my opinion, highly unlikely that he may have never heard of Kropotkin's theory. The fact that Harry Hay actually did intentionally push for designing the early gay rights organizations based on the same principles as Alcoholics Anonymous makes it distinctly likely, from my point-of-view, that Harry Hay was indeed inspired by the theories of Pyotr Kropotkin.

Also, modern support groups are almost all based off of essentially the same theoretical underpinnings as Alcoholics Anonymous, and because of this, it is arguably a fact that support groups are all a part of a communist, specifically anarcho-communist, plot.

All of this talk about anarcho-communism misses the point that, regardless of Pyotr Kropotkin's intentions, his theory on mutual aid was about as useful for starting political revolutions as the proverbial tits on a boar.

On the other hand, Kropotkin's theories actually were outstandingly useful for the purpose of socially destigmatizing alcoholism while also giving alcoholics a supportive subculture based off of the idea of helping each other live more benevolent lives as integrated, welcome, and loved members of society: by proclaiming alcoholism to be a part of their identity, whether they were currently drinking themselves to death or not, as an act of solidarity with other alcoholics that currently were drinking themselves to death, AA's members were able to get a large proportion of society to believe that alcoholics were not really "bad guys" that deserved to be punished but were, at heart, otherwise decent people that deserved a chance to reform and embrace living better lives.

In a world in which gay people were otherwise treated like terrifying monsters that lurked behind bushes, lying in wait to jump out and grab someone's impressionable child, Harry Hay would have understandably been attracted to any method of organization that might have led to destigmatizing gay people.

In spite of all of this context and background, it is also arguably a fact that support groups and also the gay rights movement constitute an anarcho-communist plot. From the perspective of someone that lived with a paranoid fear of communism and associated "anarchy" with the actions of The Joker, it is easy enough to conveniently forget that Pyotr Kropotkin's theory is really substantially more useful for starting friendly support groups than they are for inducing violent political revolutions.

As ridiculous as it might sound, it quite possible for someone to build a paranoid conspiracy theory off of this information.

In order to understand how this works, one needs to understand how the pranoid mind works. The paranoid mind tends to be hyper-alert for any information, in their environment, that constitutes a threat, and once a person that is inclined to paranoia has become established in a belief, that person's inclination is to cherry-pick information in their environment in such a way as to build up support for that belief. In a similar fashion, a person with paranoid schizophrenia might form auditory hallucinations in the sound a fan: ironically, a person with paranoid schizophrenia actually does hear the sounds that that person interprets as "people talking." None of those sounds are really imagined. However, it is only possible for that person to interpret that random noise as speech by selectively ignoring context. In the paranoid mind, the surrounding context is irrelevant: what that person is looking for is threatening information, and any non-threatening information really does not matter. In fact, the paranoid mind might even see that surrounding noise itself as an intentional deception.

This is relevant to us zoophiles. People that are easily moved to paranoid fear cannot really be reasoned with directly. The problem is not a lack of information, but the problem is the fact that the paranoid mind does have that information: unfortunately, that person also sees information that conflicts with established conclusions as a threat or an attempt to deceive. The more vigorously one attempts to directly assail that person's beliefs, the more obessed that person becomes with those beliefs.

For instance, it does not matter that, put in proper context, someone really does not need more proof of consent to have sex with an animal than one needs proof of consent to go out and play fetch with that animal, since animals are, unlike human women, incapable of comprehending any kind of social stigma related to sexuality. Arguing that strict proof of consent is not really important, here, just sounds, to a paranoid mind, like an attack on consent itself, and the paranoid mindset will ultimately exaggerate this perceived attack into the perceived attacker being a part of an alt-right conspiracy to deprive women and sexual minorities of all of the rights they have gained over the course of the 20th Century and early 21st Century. No matter how good ones arguments are, the paranoid mindset will only ever perceive those areguments as a cunning defense of a magnificently evil position. The better the arguments for that magnificently evil position, the more terrifying they are. The problem with those arguments is that they are actually very good arguments, and that is what makes our adversaries so afraid of us, weird as this sounds.

Instead, be more direct. Be very direct. Directly attack the paranoia itself.

One of the most effective methods, of getting someone to look more closely at their own beliefs, is to listen to that person. The longer that person talks and feels listened to, the more interested that person will be in details and the more receptive that person will become in looking more closely at information that had previously been given a lower priority. A person that has been given a chance to express and develop their point-of-view almost always comes around, in time, to a less extreme, less violent interpretation of that point-of-view. The problem, for that person, was never a lack of information, but the problem was being too often on the defensive to look closely at all of that information in detail. It is unlikely that this will induce a dramatic reversal, in that person's positions, in a day or even over several months, but the idea is not really not to change that person's mind. Reducing the amount of force that that person needs in order to get someone to listen to that person's concerns ultimately puts the brakes on the feedback loop that drives that person to obession, including obessive propaganda.

For example, letting a person that has a paranoid mindset talk for long enough will eventually lead to that person exposing the root cause behind that paranoia, such as a traumatic experience in that person's past, and ultimately, that traumatic experience has greater practical significance than the manufactured threat that was used to avoid dealing with it. That person might suffer from guilt over a past transgression, even if that guilt is misplaced. When that person no longer has as much interest in an external threat, the real substance of that person's anxiety tends to come out.

It is helpful to have realistic expectations of a person that has spent years with entrenched belief that zoophiles are evil. It is unlikely that that person will change their mind altogether until perhaps very late in life and under intense social pressure, but on the other hand, it is possible to be an "evil zoophile" but also a "great listener" or even good friend. That person might not really change their belief, but that belief can become less important than the broader context of that person's relationship with someone that happens to be a zoophile.

The most important point, in regard to irrational beliefs, is that they are never really based entirely on fabrication. The data that those irrational beliefs come from is real, but it is merely cherry-picked and then framed in such a way as to appear to support an irrational belief. The pieces that that irrational belief is built out of are real, even though the conclusions are false. This gives those irrational beliefs an illusion, to the person that harbors them, of being unassailable truth. If someone attacks the belief, then one is attacking the wrong target. From the perspective of a person that is capable of paranoid fear and hate, a formidable attack on that person's position just looks like a formidable lie.

Listening for a while almost always leads to that person arriving at the underlying truth behind why that person clings to such paranoid beliefs as a defense. In the end, this is also useful for dealing with alt-right extremists and people that believe that the moon landing was a hoax. They might always cling to their beliefs as a source of security, but once the underlying issues are being dealt with, they will be less important in that person's mind.


In acknowledgment that I also could stand to spend more time putting psychology on my side,

Sigma
Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Under the leadership of reputed Satanist Aleister Crowley (who at times confirmed that the voice he called "Aiwass" was truly Satan), the occultists of the early 20th Century founded the occultist movement Thelema, and the Thelemite priestess Regina Kahl, at one time, was befriended to the known communist Harry Hay, who was one of the founders of the Society of Fools (which was cunningly renamed as the "Mattachine Society"). The Society of Fools helped to give birth to the American "gay rights movement."

Furthermore, all support groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous, are truly a part of an anarcho-communist plot. Beware of all support groups. The entire basis on which they are organized can be traced back to the writings of a Russian prince, known for his evolutionist views and his adoration of the father of anarchism, who suggested that humans ought to live and behave like animals. If you are invited to take part in a support group, you are truly being taught a form of communism that is designed to lead to anarchy.

However, the international gay rights movement was truly whelped on a fateful day in the month of May, 1893, when an Ashkenazi Jewish-German homosexual attended the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It is possible that, after this man was forbidden, later in life, to return there to speak on his deviant ideas, he traveled to San Francisco at the same time when Harry Hay might have been visiting there during his education at Stanford University (unsurprisingly also the Alma Mater of Kamala Harris), which was a hot bed of communists even then.

Everything that I have told you above is based on established historical fact. The zooey community must learn the wisdom of that prophet of the Aeon of Horus, Aleister Crowley, and as the Aeon of Horus grinds to its end, we must help to usher in the new age that lies beyond.

Speaking of history, I want to take this opportunity to call out to all zoophiles that have any knowledge whatsoever of the history of the zooey community. I want to get you involved in helping to flesh out the historical points of the wiki. I want to get in some detailed information on the Usenet newsgroups, Zoo's Destiny, Elite Zoo, and, if I remember correctly, the one named Calizoo. Please contact either me or any of the other editors of the wiki, especially Dog Mike.


Thank you,
Sigma
Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

The hardest thing in the world, for some of us to do, is to take our own advice. We give that advice because, due to something that is built into our own primitive instincts, we really need that advice the most.

It is my natural inclination to think in big ways. I use big words. I think in long diatribes that would take a normal person hours to read. Because of that, I come across as overwhelming, and I overwhelm even myself, sometimes overwhelming myself into inaction.

Self-directedness is, partly, about thinking in terms of what you already know you can do and just deciding to do those things. This trait was identified by Cloninger, in the Temperament and Character Inventory, as a trait that anybody can, at least to an extent, develop because of their education or their life experience.

There I go being overwhelming, then. I do that. It's part of my instincts to want to investigate things with a sense of depth. The clockwork that makes all of these things go is beautiful to me.

I am going to try to simplify Cloninger's wisdom, though. Think about two different people.

One of the two people is an extreme anti-zoophile troll that hates zoophiles because that person psychologically needs someone to hate, no matter whom. If it were not us, it would be some other patsy. No matter what one of us zoophiles says to that person, that person is not going to change.

The other person is someone that is already sympathetic toward zoophiles and believes that, regardless of whether or not they understand our sexuality, we are people, and we deserve to be treated like people. We don't have to preach to those people. We just have to realize that those people deserve our friendship, and we should emulate their example. We can teach those people that it's really worth it to give people a chance.

If you have not learned about the idea of self-directedness, you might think that it is more important to change the minds of the people that hate us, but that is not really a box that you can put a check-mark in. It is just throwing good money after bad.

It is more useful to put a check-mark in a place where we have a box to put it in.

When we are faced with big problems, it is easy to get caught up in the idea that we have to deal with a big problem with big goals, but that is not really helpful thinking.

Even within the zooey community, I often forget this. There are many zoos that are entrenched in a sense of fear, and they even attack other zoophiles like crabs in a bucket based on that fear, dragging other zoophiles down out of a sense of fear and distrust. It is sorely tempting to get angry at those people, and I do get angry, sometimes.

I get angry because that fear is really self-defeating. It is like the fear of a small child that throws a blanket over his head, believing that the blanket makes him invisible. It does not work that way. Seeing people reduced to such infantile instincts makes me sad and angry.

However, I have spent this weekend in the company of a zoophile that has been there in the past, himself, but is starting to believe that there is something we can do besides make futile attempts to hide, and that person is starting to think of ideas that never would have occurred to me.

Self-directedness is about realizing what we actually can do and just doing it.

People that lack self-directedness sometimes overlook those goals that are actually feasible because they carry around in their heads a self-defeating belief that all things that are worth doing are insurmountable and must require extraordinary talent or gift. It is an illusion, and that illusion is put into people's heads based on a few too many defeats, in life, giving them an addiction to defeat. They become drawn into a sort of paralysis of analysis that can turn into an entrenched learned helplessness.

I think that some of us beat our heads against brick walls, sometimes, because it makes us angry that those brick walls are there. Even though we accept that those are indeed brick walls, we hate them for it, and sometimes, we just need to vent.

I have to lecture myself about the idea of self-directedness, and it works. Because I do think about self-directedness, I know that a time comes when I need to step away from being angry over things that I cannot change and invest myself in being a part of change that is already happening.

I am human, though. I cannot really stop myself from becoming angry, sometimes. Trying to make that anger go away should not be a goal. That anger, no matter how self-defeating and futile, will not go away.

A more useful goal is for me to get better at finding those opportunities to just take a break from that anger and to do something more useful and fulfilling.

Anyhow, I have a wiki I need to help get organized.


Until next week,
Sigma
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